A faction is a human group that has adopted a common name and agenda, usually for a political purpose.

They do so in the belief that strict reliance on any one individual reputation is bad and that by presenting a common front, they become more difficult to attack on anything but the actual issue/position/arguments that they wish considered.

A true faction has a basis for unity and a common definition of who's we? that excludes some others.

Trivial factions may exist based on uncontroversial categories or shared credentials. That is, people may be a "GPO member" or "Canadian citizen?" or "living in Ottawa" or "a Muslim? Canadian" and may prefer to associate claims or positions with that credential without revealing their specific body identity. This provides minimal evidence that their argument has a source that should be heard as an authority on that particular matter. Use of such a tag is not to say that they share anything other than that credential with everyone else who uses it.

Within some factions, identity theft is normal and it is common for one member to impersonate another or to let oneself be mistaken for another. A policy to neither confirm nor deny? is often used to retain an alleged and collective identity? without any need to lie. Such a policy is strongly advocated by the world trolling anarchization for major factions.

Where factions are not given formal status or respected and where identity speculation? is common, and the journalistic rules are not followed, it is considered fair game to adopt obvious troll name?s and attempt to confuse and misdirect advocates of sysop vandalism and Panopticon approaches to governing. Those who do so often assert they are part of a faction with the generic name "trolls" or "anonymous trolls" and will usually persist until factions and factional identities are given formal status in that forum. Wikipedia is one such experiment in this.